Emergency Services working out kinks in new radio system

The Chester County Department of Emergency Services has experienced some minor problems implementing the county’s new $42 million emergency radio system, but officials Friday expressed optimism that the issues are not affecting services.

According to department spokeswoman Patty Mains, over the past several weeks the county’s computerized tracking system has noted an increase in failed activations of mobile pagers. The county’s emergency personnel use a total of 2,883 pagers that alert fire and EMS responders of about 100 calls for service each day.

Over the past 45 days the Department of Emergency Services has identified 23 instances in which the pagers failed to receive notifications. In response, this week the department conducted testing with vendors contracted to supply the pagers to identify and remedy the source of the problem.

Officials said the problem is small and has not violated any contractual agreements.

“While this is a very small number and still within the contractual requirement of 95 percent coverage 95 percent of the time, we had to ensure the reliable operation of this critical public safety system,” Mains said. “The testing yesterday was to verify that system parameter changes will continue to provide acceptable coverage.”

Mains said the Department of Emergency Services has worked with the presidents of the Fire Chiefs’ Association and EMS Council to ensure calls for service were not impacted by the technical issue. So far there are no reports that the issue has delayed any calls for service.

Officials said that similar problems are common in any implementation of a new system.

“Any new system will have issues and part of our implementation process is to be able to identify any potential issue right away and aggressively engage the appropriate team. That is exactly what we did in this instance,” Mains said.

The recent contract agreement calls for a new radio system at the county’s Department of Emergency Services 911 operations center in West Goshen, as well as the individual radio units and computers that police, fire, and ambulance services throughout the county use daily. The current analog system, installed about 20 years ago, has been the source of complaints about “dead zones” in urban areas of the county almost since it first went on line.

The contract with Harris Communications, an internationally known communications company headquartered in Florida, calls for $27 million in capital costs for design and installation of the new system, and an associated $15 million in maintenance costs for eight years from Metropolitan Communications of Exton.

The new emergency radio system is a P25 Phase II design that avoids the costs associated with a federally mandated transition from Phase I to Phase II for the 700 Megahertz (MHz) band in 2017. The system design includes remote transmitter/receiver sites configured in two fully linked cells, modifications to the microwave transport system that connects the remote sites to the 911 center, replacement 911 consoles, and field equipment for the emergency responders, including 1,221 mobile radios, 2,750 hand-held radios and 132 control stations for emergency responder station applications.